If Kylie’s research proved correct, it would take the kicking of hundreds of asses to keep the attendees of the Carver conference safe. A lot of what she had begun to suspect was speculation, because even on the darknet, the nocturnis appeared to be operating with an abundance of caution in order not to arouse too much suspicion regarding their plans. Still, she had gathered enough data by the middle of April to warrant not just a routine call with Wynn, but a videoconference with all the currently known Guardians and Wardens at once.
It took a couple of days to put together. Kylie arranged it all, of course, but she had to talk the others through the process of installing the necessary software on their computers. Thanks to everything holy that none of them had required system or hardware upgrades to make it possible. Once she had insured everyone was online, Kylie drew her office chair in close for Dag and perched on the edge of her balance ball.
“I’m glad you guys are all here,” she began. “I know we’re still ten days out, but I wanted to make sure we had enough time to not just put together a plan, but to get everyone in place where they need to be.”
“Hey, don’t worry about us.” Fil—short for Felicity—Shalvis was a no-nonsense woman with pale blond hair and an attitude more like a cop or a biker than the artist Kylie knew her to be. “Spar and I have been waiting for this. We missed all the fun in Chicago, so if you guys need physical backup, we call dibs.”
“Um, I have a feeling you might want to dig out your suitcase.”
“Just lay it on us,” Wynn suggested, motioning with both hands in front of her. “What’s going down?”
Kylie tried for a wry smile. “Remember when we first talked and you said, ‘How about the end of the world?’ You may have hit closer to the bull’s-eye than any of us really want to contemplate.” Dag laid a hand against her back, lending his support and reminding her that she was not in this alone. None of them were. “If I’m right, this is going to be really, really bad.”
She took a deep breath and started walking them through her findings. Since the conference expected to draw more than five thousand attendees from all over the world, it represented a veritable Demon’s smorgasbord of souls all gathered in one place, ready to be consumed. The only thing Kylie and the others could be grateful for is that at almost no point would that number be gathered in one place within the convention center.
“That makes me twitchy,” she told the others. “It seems to me that part of the appeal of hitting an event this big is the ability to harvest so many souls at one time. But if they’re not all in one space, does that mean they’re intending to hit a whole bunch of different spots simultaneously? That would be a nightmare for us.”
Most of the time, she explained, attendees would be spread out among a number of smaller sessions, with each discussing an aspect of the overarching issues the conference was intended to address. There was an extensive schedule of these sessions for attendees to choose from and some were expected to draw larger crowds than others. That was the nature of these kinds of meetings. Unfortunately, Kylie didn’t know enough about the topics or the attendees to determine which of the sessions would likely draw the largest crowds.
“Am I wrong in thinking that coordinating so many simultaneous attacks would be too big a headache even for superpsycho demon worshippers?”
“No, I do not think you are,” Kees said. Ella’s Guardian looked like some kind of rogue angel, with features almost too handsome for Kylie to believe he was a real Guardian, but Spar, Knox, and Dag all accepted him at face value. Plus, he did have that gravelly Guardian voice, and the look that said he could rip off heads if suitably motivated. “That number of coordinated strikes would require hundreds, if not thousands, of nocturnis in order to achieve success. We have never seen a single sect with anything even close to those numbers. Coordination between sects is always a possibility, but Ella feels that, for now, it remains unlikely.”
“The ‘for now’ is a point worth stressing, though.” Ella, a quiet woman with brown hair and unique gray eyes, sounded wary but certain. “I think it’s inevitable that as the Order gains in strength, they will need to begin coordinating their efforts to bring about the apocalypse they’re all dreaming of. But at the moment, every time we’ve run into an active sect, it’s been headed by a big ego. That alone makes me think that until the Seven are awake and aware enough to force the groups to work together, they’re just all too power hungry and full of themselves to pull off working together in any kind of direct way.”
“Okay, that’s a little bit of good news,” Kylie said. “it also adds some weight to my theory. Now mind you, it is just a theory, and I’m not sure that what I found out is going to be enough to substantiate it for you guys, but—”